


The Clock in Merlin's Heart

by anarchycox



Series: Anarchy's Kingsman Stocking Fills [1]
Category: Kingsman (Movies)
Genre: F/M, No Dialogue, Quiet, all merlin's pov, coming down from a mission, everybody lived, post the golden circle, reflective
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-14
Updated: 2019-01-14
Packaged: 2019-10-10 04:31:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17419169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anarchycox/pseuds/anarchycox
Summary: The request was for a relationship where one helps the other cope with the aftermath of a mission, what is their routine, how do they cope, what do they do.Merlin knows Roxy well, and takes care of her even better.  He doesn't need to look at a clock, he can count the time down to the second between when she texts that she will be home and when she'll walk in the door, and he makes sure that everything she needs is ready.





	The Clock in Merlin's Heart

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mang_o](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mang_o/gifts).



She never came home at a normal hour. Other agents made it a point to return for lunch or tea time and she never returned in a pattern. One mission was 5:45pm and the next 2am, and then another just after breakfast. What was crazy about this, is no matter that each mission was different, they fell into patterns, and those patterns were such that infiltration at a party you were done at a certain time of night, assassinations if they weren’t at a public event were in the dawn.

35 years he watched missions, he could recognize the patterns.

And she defied them all.

_ ETA 25 minutes _ , was the text that woke him up at 4:29am. They had tried her just arriving home but there was the unfortunate incident where he almost killed her. It was funny in the retelling at a dinner party, less so in reality. So no matter the odd time she might arrive, she texted him.               

Merlin sat up and debated putting his legs on but he was tired and had spent yesterday working on their guestroom. He swung himself into his wheelchair and went to the bathroom and checked that all her post mission bath supplies were ready. Everything was good to go and he would start the water soon. If she said 25 minutes she meant it. He went to the kitchen and set the kettle on to make a hot toddy. No fresh lemon, he needed to go to the shops, but the bottle stuff would suffice at 4:37am. He prepared the whisky and sugar and cloves in the cup and added the few drops of lemon. 

No snack was prepared, any mission that meant coming home in the darkness meant no snack. Their kettle was the slowest on the planet, took the no watched pot wive’s tale seriously, so he went back to turn the water for the bath on at 4:41am. Just a little below scalding, lavender and sea salt scattered over the top of the water. An old oil lamp that he converted flicked on, its low wattage just casting a soft glow over the bathroom. 

He was pleased with it, as he was all the things he had done since retiring. Everyone except her had believed he’d be back at work within two weeks bored out of his mind, but he wasn’t. He was amazed how quickly time went when you kept regular hours. He also loved fixing up their flat to suit their needs better, widening doorways, putting in built in shelves. He was getting into woodwork enough he was debating finding a place to be a workshop. He was also into antiques, fixing them up, converting cheap ones to modern usage, others just restoring their old shine.

Eggsy laughed and called them his old man hobbies, but he was 58 and that was hardly young. He was on the computer just enough to keep abreast of the world, stay in contact with people, but would go days with just his phone and not touch their desktop. His migraines had stopped. Of course that also might be because keeping Arthur and Galahad alive was now someone else’s job.

At 4:50am the kettle finally screamed it’s pathetic cry. They really needed to buy a new one. It was his and older than her by a fair bit; it was warped and tarnished and beat up from countless moves. But it worked - it was rather like him in that regard.

He added just a little of the boiling water to the mixture at the bottom of the mug and stirred to blend before putting the rest of the water slowly in. He took it to the bathroom and put it on the ledge and then went back to bed. He heard the door open. 4:54am, right on time. Merlin had his lamp on just bright enough to read. He was reading the Lord of the Rings, something he had never read before. That was another pleasure of retirement, reading. Not reports or schematics but decades of missed reading. He didn’t have a favourite genre, one day it was a classic of the British canon, the next an Archie comic at the checkout counter at Aldi’s. He liked Jayne Ann Krentz more than Nora Roberts, Joe Hill more than Stephen King, and Jasper Fforde more than Neil Gaiman.

And he loved old pulps.

He called her his Princess of Mars when he was feeling sentimental. He heard her taking off her clothes and getting into the water. The sigh after the first sip of toddy. He figured he could get a chapter read. Or not. It was a tree one. He could be a fanciful man, he loved fantasy but Tolkien was a little too in love with the history and linguistics. It made sense of course, but he was struggling to read the books.

He was recently getting into urban fantasy romance. Vampire porn as she called them. He wasn’t embarrassed, they were fun. When he was having a bad day, phantom limbs or the hip that had been broken ached, she would get the heat pads and put his head in her lap and read the books to him. She had a beautiful reading voice.

It was 19 minutes since she had gotten into the water and that meant the plug would be pulled shortly. 4 minutes to dry off and moisturize and cough with the last sip of toddy.

He heard the cough and put the book away and put music on. If she arrived between 4 and 7am it was Brahms, she needed soothing at that hour. He looked up as the bedroom door opened. He gave her a brief look over and she appeared in one piece, no visible damage on her face or neck.

Her hair was short these days, undercut with a sweeping top. It aged her a little but time was doing that as well. It worked well with her jaw line. And long would have made it easy to hide her scars. She was not the sort to hide anything.

He read comic books sometimes and remembered what a writer once said about Carol Danvers,  _ when Carol gets back up it is because fuck you that’s why _ . That was the essence of her since she had been blown up. Before, in training, it was nobility, and determination; almost dying, gaining those burn scars on her neck and shoulder gave her a large dose of fuck you.

The first time he had seen that in her eyes, when they both were recovering from Poppy, that was when he realized he was going to fall in love with her.

She told him that she had fallen in love with him when she had been sitting at the table a month and an older agent made a crack and Merlin had said given his druthers he’d hang the lot of them and just keep her.

Eggsy was the one obviously troubled and from a broken home and got the hugs and praise. No one noticed that no one had ever kept her before. And Merlin had wanted to keep her. So she decided to keep him as well.

They were very well kept with each other.

He smiled at her, softly, and gave a nod. It would be another 15 minutes before they said a word. She took off her robe and turned slowly, naked, so he could see that she had no injuries. She put on a pair of his boxer briefs and a worn thin vest and crawled into the bed. They didn’t touch, just lay there and looked at each other.

10 minutes and he put his hand palm up between them. 12 minutes and she took it.

He didn’t need a clock, his body always knew when the 15 minutes passed, his heart was so tuned to what she needed when she returned to the second. When she was gone on a mission her name was never spoken. She did not exist, to him, to the office, to anyone. She was Agent or Lancelot or her or she. The name ceased to exist from the time she went to the weapons locker to 15 minutes after she and Merlin acknowledged each other and she had had what she needed.

He squeezed her hand and she squeezed back.

“Roxy, my darling, welcome home.”


End file.
